Another major Christian celebration, at least for many Christian denominations, is
AllSaints’Day, also known as AllHallow’sDay or Hallowmas, among
other names (saints were known as hallows
in Old English, as we shall see). In Spanish, it is called DíadeTodoslosSantos, which literally means 'all saints' day' or 'day of all the saints'. In Christianity, a saint is primarily 'a person officially recognized, especially by canonization, as being entitled to public veneration and capable of interceding for people on earth' (AHD). It became a tradition in early Christianity to celebrate saints every year on the day of their death but as more an more saints started to fill the calendar, a catch-all day to celebrate the many lesser known and anonymous ones was established in the early 7th century.

All Saints’ Day has taken place on November 1 for the last
1,300 years or so. The purpose of this day is to celebrate all saints, known and
unknown, and it is celebrated in the Catholic tradition as well as in some Protestant
traditions, though we shouldn’t forget that until the Protestant Reformation in
the 16th century, all European Christians were Catholic, and Christianity in
the Americas descends from European Christianity. As we said, this Christian
tradition started in the early 7th century, though there had been an earlier
tradition of celebrating All Martyrs Day since the 3rd century. For the first
hundred years or so, in the 7th century, All Saints’ Day was celebrated on May
1st, not on November 1st. It is quite likely that the date was moved to
November because that is around the time that some pre-Christian European
cultures, in particular the Celtic ones, remembered the dead, in a celebration known
as Samhain, ‘the first day of November, celebrated by the ancient Celts as a
festival marking the beginning of winter and of the new year according to their
calendar’ (OED). Many traditional cultures in the northern hemisphere had a
special celebration at the end of the summer (warm weather), associated with
life, and the beginning of winter (cold weather), associated with death. The setting
of this celebration at this time is just one more of the many attempts of early
Christianity to take over key pagan celebrations in order to gain acceptance, as
we have seen.

In the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, in the Semitic
and Greek worlds where Christianity started, the day ended at dusk and thus the day started in what for us would be the evening before, as night-time began. Because of this, many traditional religious
holidays start in what to us is the evening of the holiday's previous day, the holiday’s
eve (cf. Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, etc.). The evening before AllSaints’Day, that is, October 31, is known
traditionally in English as AllHallows’ (Day’s)Eve or, more commonly, in a compressed version of this phrase, Halloween. In Spanish, this day (or actually evening) is called Víspera de Todos los Santos,
literally ‘All Saints’ Day’s Eve’ (see below for more information about the
unrelated words Eng. eve and Sp. víspera).[1]

The day after All Saints’ Day, that is, November 2, is known
as AllSouls’Day in English.
This date was added to the other one (or two, if you count October 31st as a separate
day) in the 11th century to form the Allhallowtide triduum.[1]AllSouls’Day is dedicated to the ‘faithfully departed’, that is to say, the dead.
It is formally known in Spanish as DíadelosDifuntos or ConmemoraciónalosFielesDifuntos, though it is also more informally known as Día de los Muertos o Día de los Difuntos or even, less
commonly, Día de las ánimas.[2]In Spanish-speaking countries, November 2 is the day in which
people traditionally visit the tombstones of their departed relatives. In the Christian
tradition, it is a day to pray for the souls of the departed, especially those who
might still be in Purgatory, which in Catholic doctrine is ‘a place or state of
suffering inhabited by the souls of sinners who are expiating their sins before
going to heaven’ (COED).

This two-day day period (November 1-2), plus the eve of
the first day’s (October 31), which was dedicated to celebrating the dead, including
saints, martyrs, and the departed in general, was traditionally known in
English as Allhallowtide, Hallowtide, Allsaintstide, all compound words that are now archaic. More modern equivalents of
these names are the Hallowmas season
or thetime or season of All Saints’ Day. In Spanish, the phrase Todos los Santos is sometimes used
informally to refer to this 2-or-3-day period of celebration.[ii]

The word tide in the old-fashioned names we just saw is now only used with the sense ‘the alternate rising and falling of the sea due to
the attraction of the moon and sun’ (COED), but in the Old English period it
meant ‘time, period, era’. The original sense of this word is also found in now
uncommon (but not obsolete) expressions such as Christmastide
‘Christmas time’, Eastertide
‘Easter time’, eveningtide or eventide ‘evening time’, and morningtide ‘morning time’.

The English word hallow [ˈhæ.loʊ̯] that we saw in several
words referring to this season has an interesting story. This word is rather
rare in modern English, at least in American English. The derived adjective hallowed, meaning ‘highly venerated’ or
‘sacrosanct’ (AHD), is perhaps more common, often heard in phrases such as hallowed ground or hallowed war heroes. The word hallow
is mostly only a verb today, but in earlier times it could also be a noun that
meant ‘a saint or holy person’, which is the sense we find in expressions like All Hallows’ Eve.

The English noun hallow,
which descends from Old English hālga
‘holy one, saint’, could also be used to
refer to shrines or relics associated with holy persons—or, in pre-Christian times, gods—such as magical objects. In Middle English, this noun changed
to halwe and its meaning was ‘a saint’,
as well as ‘holy thing, shrine’. The noun hallow
is archaic in Modern English. In recent times, many English speakers probably
encountered the noun hallow for the first
time in the last novel of the Harry Potter series of children’s books, which had
the title HarryPotterandtheDeathlyHallows. In this novel, the word hallows referred to magical objects,
since the deathly hallows are three
highly powerful magical objects that were created by Death.

The English verb to hallow
means ‘to make holy, consecrate, sanctify’ or ‘venerate, greatly revere’. It
comes from Old English hālgian, which
also meant ‘to hallow, sanctify, make holy’. In Middle English, the word
changed to halwen, but its meaning
was the same. This verb is equivalent to Spanish bendecir, consagrar, and santificar. Although the noun and the
verb are homonymous in Modern English, that is, they sound and are spelled the same way, we have seen that they were slightly
different in earlier times, sharing a root but having different endings or
suffixes.

Both the verb and the noun hallow are related to the adjective holy, which was hāliġ or hāleġ in Old English and which meant ‘holy,
consecrated, sacred, venerated, godly, saintly’. They all share the same root, a
root that is also found in words like whole
and health. Eng. whole, the most basic of all these words, comes from Old Eng. hāl, meaning ‘healthy, safe, whole, free
from injury’. The adjective holy is
derived from whole, by the addition
of the adjectival suffix -y, as in messy and runny.[3]
Although it is hard to know exactly, the OED guesses that the meaning of the
Old English version of holy meant ‘that
must be preserved whole or intact, that cannot be transgressed or violated’
(OED).

When the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity in the 7th
century, the Old English words holy, hallow, and to hallow came to be used to translate Latin Christian words. The
adjective holy translated the Latin
adjective sanctus (feminine sancta) that meant as ‘holy, saintly’.
The noun hallow translated the Latin nouns
sanctus and sancta that meant ‘saint’ (a person), source of Sp. santo (shortened to san before a name) and santa
and derived from the adjective that we just saw. The Old English verb to hallow came to be used to translate
the Latin verb sanctifĭcāre
‘to make holy’ (source of Spanish learned santificar
‘to sanctify, make holy’). The noun saint
was borrowed later into English, in the 12th century, from Fr. saint (fem. seinte), meaning both ‘a saint’ and ‘a holy relic’, the same as hallow. This word has come to replace hallow to a large extent, though without
the meaning ‘holy relic’ any longer. The verb sanctify was borrowed later, in the 14th century, from Fr. saintefier. This verb has pretty much
replaced the verb to hallow. Thus
Eng. saint is a cognate of Sp. santo/a and Eng. sanctify is a cognate of Sp. santificar.

By the way, the words Eng. saint and Sp. santo/a
come from Lat. sanctus/a, passive participle
of the verb sancīre that meant
primarily ‘to consecrate, appoint as sacred’, that is, ‘to render, make or
appoint as sacred or inviolable by a religious act’, something very close to
what the verb to hallow meant in Old
English. Thus, the Latin participle sānctus
meant something like ‘made inviolable or established as sacred’. In Late Latin,
this participle was converted into a noun, as we have seen, meaning what it
means today, namely ‘a saint’, ‘a person who lives a holy and virtuous life’.
In Catholic and Orthodox creed, a saint is ‘a person officially recognized,
especially by canonization, as being entitled to public veneration and capable
of interceding for people on earth’ (AHD).

In addition to the word hallow
‘saint’, in the word Halloween, and
its fuller form All Hallows’ Eve, we
also find the word eve. As we
mentioned in previous sections, in ancient traditions, the day starts at dusk, not
at midnight as it does now, on what we now call the eve of the day. Modern English eve,
pronounced [ˈiv] comes
from Old English æfen, pronounced
[ˈæ.ven], which descends from Proto-Germanic *ēbanþs. The Old English word referred primarily to ‘the time
between sunset and darkness’, whereas in Modern English, eve means ‘the day or period of time immediately before an event’
and, in particular, ‘the evening or day before a religious festival’ (COED), a
sense it acquired in the 13th century. The equivalent of Eng. eve in Spanish is víspera. Sp. víspera [ˈbis.pe.ɾa] ‘day before’ comes from Lat.
vespera ‘evening, eventide’. We find
a descendant of this word in Eng. vespers
‘a service of evening prayer’ (COED).

The word eve is related
to the word evening [ˈiv.nɪŋ], from Old English æfnung
‘the coming of evening, sunset, time around sunset’. The word evening is a hard one to translate into
Spanish, since there are several words that can be used to express this
meaning. One of them is tarde, a word
that as an adverb means ‘late’ as in Llegar
tarde ‘to arrive late’.[4]
As a noun, however, tarde is
typically often translated as afternoon,
but it is a period of time that goes from noon until it gets dark, when the noche ‘night’ starts, which thus
includes the early evening time.[5]
For the late evening time, after it is fully dark, which can be quite early in
winter and quite late in summer in the northern hemisphere, we can use noche to translate evening in Spanish. The compound tarde-noche is also sometimes used to translate Eng. evening, though it is quite rare.

(Actually, the meaning of words having to do with
times of the day can also depend on customary daily routines in a culture. For
instance, the word mediodía, which
supposedly means ‘noon’, lit. ‘half day’, does not correspond to the English
word noon in Spain, where most people
understand mediodía as ‘lunch-time’,
which can be as late as 2-3pm.)

English

Spanish

afternoon

mediodía ‘noon’

tarde ‘after lunch’

evening

noche ‘after dark’

night

Going back to our Hallowmas celebrations, we have seen that, traditionally, the
celebration of All Saints’ Day, which is on November 1st, started on the evening
before, namely, on October 31. The traditional name for this time in English is
Halloween, or Hallowe’en, pronounced today either [ˈhæ.lə.ˌwin]
or [ˌhæ.lə.ˈwin], with the main stress on either the first or the last
syllable. This word is nothing but a contraction of the phrase AllHallows’Even. The word even comes from Scots, the dialect of English used in the Lowlands
of Scotland. In this dialect, eve and evening
are both even, usually contracted to e’en or een.

In England, there existed many Halloween-related traditions,
such as trick-or-treating, carving pumpkins, and costume parties, which have
eventually morphed into the modern-day traditions. These traditions are thought
to have originated from pagan Celtic harvest festivals, in particularly the
Gaelic end-of-summer festival of Samhain. In other words, the pagan, Celtic festival
of Samhain was Christianized as Halloween. For the Celts, this day marked the start
of winter and beginning of the year, a time of encounter between the living and
the dead, which fit well with the Christian tradition of remembering and
honoring the dead.

The traditional Halloween is known in Spanish is known as VísperadeTodoslosSantos
(All Saint’s Day Eve), which did not have any special significance in the Spanish-speaking
world, other than being the traditional start of the TodoslosSantos celebration. In recent years, however,
the influence of the children-centered Halloween celebrations coming from English-speaking
countries has started to be felt in many Spanish-speaking countries. Such child-centered
partying is also known in Spanish as Halloween,
pronounced [xa.lo.ˈɡu̯in], or else as Nochede(las)brujas ‘Night of (the) Witches’. The day
itself is also known Díade(las)brujas ‘Day of (the) Witches’.[iii]

The focus of the traditional All Hallows’ Eve revolves around
the use of humor and ridicule to confront death, which is the source of the present-day
children’s activities, which for most people is all that is left of this traditionally
Christian celebration.[iv]
The modern Halloween celebrations and customs in the English-speaking world were
brought to North America by the Irish and the Welsh in the 19th century and contributed
to the modern child-centered tradition.

A major modern Halloween tradition in North America and the British
Isles involves children going door-to-door in costume demanding candy, a practice
known as trick-or-treat or to go trick-or-treating, which refers to
‘a children’s custom of calling at houses at Halloween with the threat of pranks
if they are not given a small gift’ (COED).[v]
The source of this recent tradition seems to be the practice of souling in late medieval times in Europe,
in which poor people would go house-to-house on All Saints Day offering a prayer
for the dead in exchange for some food.[vi]
Interestingly, as we just mentioned, the children’s tradition of
trick-or-treating has spread to many Spanish-speaking countries in recent years.[vii]
The Spanish-speaking world has not settled yet on a phrase equivalent to trick-or-treat, though some vying candidates
seem to be dulceotruco, trucootrato (or tracootruco), dulceotravesura, and tretaotrato.[viii]

Most of these expressions are quite bad renderings of the
original English expression, which they attempt to calque. The Spanish word truco can mean ‘trick’, but mostly only
the sense of trick that means ‘skill,
knack’ or ‘deception, ruse’, not the sense that means ‘prank, joke’, which
translates as broma. The Spanish word
trato does not mean ‘treat’, but
rather ‘deal’ or ‘treatment’. The word treta
means ‘trick, ruse’ and is not a bad translation of the sense of trick in trick-or-treat.

This same period coincides with the celebration of DíadelosMuertos, or ‘Day of the dead’ in Mexico, where it is a national holiday
that lasts the two already-mentioned days (November 1-2).[ix]
In pre-Columbian Mexico, the celebration of the dead was already a big deal for
the indigenous cultures, and it used to be celebrated in the summertime.
However, upon the arrival of Christianity, the celebration was moved to coincide
with the Catholic festival of Allhallowtide.
Similar celebrations involving the dead are found in other parts of Latin America,
such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Brazil. The DíadelosMuertos
celebration until recently was restricted to southern parts of Mexico and it was
rejected in other areas as having too many pagan elements, but now it is a public
holiday throughout the country.

In the Spanish Allhallowtide
tradition, the first day, November 1st, is known as DíadelosInocentes
(‘day of the innocents’) or, in some countries, DíadelosAngelitos
(‘day of the little angels’) and it is dedicated to deceased infants and children.
This DíadelosInocentes celebration should not to be confused
with the DíadelosSantosInocentes in Catholic tradition, which in English, is called (Holy)Innocents’Day or Childermas. This day marks the Biblical narrative
of infanticide by Herod the Great, the Roman-appointed king of the Jews, an event
known in English as the MassacreoftheInnocents.[xi]
This day, which in Catholic tradition is celebrated on December 28, is also known
in Spanish as Díadelasbromas ‘day of the practical jokes’, and
is the Hispanic equivalent of April Fool’s
Day in English-speaking (and some other European) countries.[xii]
The reason for this seems to be that the word inocente, in addition to ‘innocent’ or ‘not guilty’, can also mean ‘naïve,
sucker’ in Spanish. The tradition of playing tricks on people on this day seems
to have started from the double meaning of the word inocente in Spanish.

There is little doubt that this three-day long Christian celebration
was another appropriation of earlier pagan rites going back millennia during the
process of Christianization.[xiii]
We have already mentioned the fall or end-of-summer (and beginning-of-winter) or
harvest festivals that were commonly found in pre-Christian societies, such as
Celtic festival of Samhain. The celebration of Thanksgiving, kwown as (Día de) Acción de Gracias in Spanish, which takes place on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States (on the second Monday in October in Canada), has also been
interpreted by some as a form of harvest celebration inherited from earlier
times when the agricultural cycle was much more ever-present in people’s lives.[xiv]

[1]The earliest records of the practice of starting the day at nightfall
are found in Babylon, which seems to be where the Jews picked it up during
their exile there starting in the 6th century BCE. In the early books of the
Hebrew Bible, the word for ‘day’ refers just to the daylight hours and it
contrasts with the word for ‘night’. The Greeks and the Phoenicians also
reckoned the day from sunset to sunset. The Romans, on the other hand, started
the day at midnight, a tradition that we now follow in the West and in the
whole world more generally. Other peoples reckoned the full day from sunrise to
sunrise.

[3]The English adjectival suffix ‑y
descends from Old English ‑ig, which
descends from Proto-Germanic *-igaz,
which is a cognate of the Latin suffix ‑ic‑us
and the Ancient Greek suffix ‑ικ‑ός(-ik‑ós).

[4] Note
that the adverb tarde cannot be used
with the verbs ser or estar, because unlike Eng. late, it cannot be used as an adjective.
Thus, there is no simple way to translate Eng. to be late. To express that meaning, different verbs must be used
with the adverb tarde, as in llegar tarde ‘to arrive late’ or empezar tarde ‘to start late’.
Additionally, other verbs can be used to express this meaning such as atrasarse, retrasarse, demorarse, llevar retraso, ir retrasado, ir con retraso,
andar retrasado, or andar con retraso.

The adverb tarde
comes from the Latin adverb tardē
that meant ‘slowly’ and ‘late’. It was derived from the adjective tardus, that meant ‘slow, sluggish’,
‘tardy, late’, as well as ‘dull, stupid, slow-witted’. Also derived from this
adjective was the verb tardāre
which meant ‘to make slow, to hinder, delay, etc.’. This verb is the source of
Sp. tardar ‘to take a long time’. In
English, the adjectives tardy (Sp. tardío/a) and retarded (Sp. retrasado/a)
contain this Latin root as well.

[5] In some
Spanish-speaking countries, such as Spain, the tarde is not considered to start until after lunch, which can start
quite late, such as 2:00-3:00pm. Thus, the tarde
does not start until around 4:00pm or 5:00pm in such countries. Thus, in Spain,
one cannot typically translate afternoon
as tarde. If one means afternoon literally as after noon, one should probably say después del mediodía, lit. ‘after noon’.

[iv] Portaro, Sam (25 January
1998). A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and
Fasts. Cowley Publications. p. 199: “All Saints’ Day is the centerpiece of
an autumn triduum. In the carnival celebrations of All Hallows’ Eve our
ancestors used the most powerful weapon in the human arsenal, the power of
humor and ridicule to confront the power of death. The following day, in the
commemoration of All Saints, we gave witness to the victory of incarnate
goodness embodied in remarkable deeds and doers triumphing over the misanthropy
of darkness and devils. And in the commemoration of All Souls we proclaimed the
hope of common mortality expressed in our aspirations and expectations of a
shared eternity.” Quoted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween

Verbs and nouns derived from the root sĭgnāre by prefixation

Introduction

Latin had a number of verbs derived from the verb sĭgnāre by prefixation. Several of these
have made it into Spanish and English and remain common to this day. Some of the
Spanish verbs are patrimonial, such as enseñar
‘to show; to teach’, diseñar ‘to design’,
and reseñar ‘to review, describe’ (the
associated noun is reseña ‘review’). Additionally,
Spanish has a number of learned (borrowed) versions of Latin words derived from
sĭgnāre by prefixation. Many of these
words have English cognates. The main Latin verbs derived from sĭgnāre by prefixation are the
following:

ad‑

+ sĭgnāre

assĭgnāre

‘to appoint to, assign, distribute, allot,
allocate’

con‑

cōnsĭgnāre

‘to (fix a)
seal; put on record; establish; attest/authenticate’

dē-

dēsĭgnāre

‘to mark out, point out, trace,
designate, define’

in‑

insĭgnāre

(Vulgar Latin)
‘to engrave’

ob‑

obsĭgnāre

‘to sign, seal’

re‑

resĭgnāre

‘to unseal,
open; to give back, give up, resign; to annul, cancel’

sub‑

subsĭgnāre

‘to mark, undersign, enter,
register; to mortgage’

Sp. diseñar
and Eng. design

Both the Spanish verb diseñar and its English cognate
todesign [dɪ.ˈzaɪ̯n] mean something like ‘to make drawings or plans before
something is made or created’. Because of the letter ñ on this word, one might be tempted to think that this word is a patrimonial
word, but it is actually a 16th century borrowing from Italian disegnare, pronounced [di.seɲ.ˈɲa.ɾe], meaning ‘to draw’. This
word ultimately comes from Latin dēsĭgnāre
or dissĭgnāre (both spellings are
found for basically the same verb since Lat. dis‑ came to have a similar meaning to dē‑ in Latin). This Latin verb had at least two major
senses: ‘to signal, make a mark, mark out, trace out’ and ‘to designate,
appoint, denote’. This verb was formed from the verb sĭgnāre ‘to make a mark’ by adding the prefix dē‑ ‘out, etc.’ or dis‑
‘apart, reversal, etc.’ (variant allomorph: dī).

dē‑ ‘out, etc.’

sĭgnāre

desĭgnāre

‘to signal, make a mark, mark out,
indicate, describe, etc.’

In Spanish, the corresponding noun to the verb diseñar is diseño, which is
equivalent to the English noun design.
This noun appears in Spanish writings later than the verb in the 16th century.
The ultimate source is It. disegno¸
whichis derived by conversion from
the verb.

The English verb to
design and the noun design came
into English in the 16th century, presumably through French and ultimately from
Italian. The story of these two words is somewhat confused. Let us start with
the noun design, which is a loanword from Middle French desseign ‘purpose, project, design’, which
got it from Italian disegno. This
Italian word had what can be seen as two major different senses: ‘model,
picture’ and ‘purpose’, seemingly derived from the two major senses the source
word had in Latin. Below you can see the three main meanings of the English
noun design, the first two are
derived from the ‘model, picture’ sense and the third one from the purpose one:

designn.

·a plan or drawing produced to show
the look and function of something before it is built or made.

·a decorative pattern

·the
purpose or planning that exists behind an action or object.

French ended up differentiating the two senses in
the spelling, using dessein for ‘purpose,
plan’ and dessin for ‘design in art’
(OED), but English kept them as a single polysemous word. (Note that the two
French words have the same pronunciation, namely [de.ˈsɛ̃].)

Only the first two senses of the English noun design translate into Spanish as diseño. The third one, which can be
paraphrased as ‘intention, plot’, translates by a word that shares the same
root, namely designio, a learned loan from Latin desĭgnĭum, the source of It. disegno and, thus, a cognate. There may
have been an older patrimonial version of this word, namely deseño, but it was replaced by the learned
version. The Spanish word designio, however,
is quite fancy. Better translations of this sense of the English noun design are intención, propósito, objetivo, or plan.

The third sense of Eng. design
is admittedly rare. It is used primarily in two idiomatic phrases. The first
one is by design, which translates
into Spanish as deliberadamente (cf. Eng.
deliberately) or some other
synonymous phrases. The second idiomatic phrase is to have designs on something or someone, which means ‘to aim to
obtain, especially in an underhand way’ and, informally, ‘to have an
undisclosed sexual interest in’ (COED). This expression translates into Spanish as tener los ojos puestos en algo/alguien.

The situation with the verbs related to the noun design are equally confused. The Italian
verb dissegnare also had two major
senses in the 16th century. They would eventually be borrowed into French at
different times, and from there they were borrowed by English and perhaps also
by Spanish, though maybe the Spanish words were obtained directly from Italian.
In French, the two senses eventually came to have different spellings:

For the artistic sense, English has the verb todesign (a cognate of Sp. diseñar). It may have been borrowed from
French désigner though it may also
have been derived from the noun design,
which was presumably borrowed first.[a]
When English first obtained the verb design
it seems to have had both of the original meanings, but sense (1) has been now
been taken over by the learned designate,
a 17th century coinage which means ‘give a specified name, position, or status
to’ (COED). Spanish too now has the learned word (cultismo) designar for
this sense as well, which is a cognate. This word was already attested in the
mid-14th century.

The two verbs Eng. designate [ˈdɛ.zɪɡ.neɪ̯t] and Sp. designar [d̪e.siɡ.ˈnaɾ] are pretty close friends, but they are not perfect
matches. They share the ‘appoint’ sense (synonyms: Sp. nombrar, Eng. appoint)
and to some extent also a more formal and more rare ‘indicate, show’ sense
(synonym: indicar, señalar). Spanish uses designar with yet a third sense, namely
the ‘fix, set a place or date’ sense, which translates into English as to fix, to set, or to arrange.

From the verb design,
English has derived the agentive noun designer
for ‘someone who designs’. It is formed with the English agentive suffix ‑er. The equivalent of this noun in
Spanish is a noun derived from the verb diseñar
with the agentive suffix ‑dor(a): diseñador(a). In the world of theater, a
(set) designer is known in Spanish as an escenógrafo/a.
The English noun designer is often used as a modifier in compounds such as designer clothes or designer drug. These phrases have been calqued into Spanish by
means of the noun diseño, cf. ropa de diseño (also ropa de marca), droga de diseño.

Sp. enseñar

The verb enseñar is very common in Spanish. It
has two main senses, which can be easily distinguished in context according to what
it is that follows the verb:

(1)‘to show/reveal’,
as in Meenseñóellibro ‘She showed me the book’

(2)‘to
teach’, as in Meenseñóaleer ‘She taught me how to read’

In some cases, the actual sense intended may
not be clear, resulting in ambiguous sentences, such as Meenseñóelcamino
‘She showed/taught me the way’. Also, the ‘show/reveal’ sense typically refers to
a voluntary act, but in some contexts it can be understood as involuntary, as in
Enseñaslapantorrilla ‘Your lower
leg is showing’.

ĭn‑ ‘in’ + sĭgnāre

ĭnsĭgnāre

‘to mark with a sign; to distinguish; to
engrave’

Enseñar is
a patrimonial word whose source is Vulgar Latin insĭgnāre ‘mark with a sign, to engrave’, formed with the prefix ĭn‑ ‘in’ and the verb sĭgnāre ‘to make a mark’ (principal parts:
insignō, insignāre, insignāvī, insignātum). Actually, this first
conjugation Vulgar Latin insĭgnāre is
derived from the fourth conjugation Classical Latin verb insĭgnīre, which meant ‘mark with a characteristic feature; to distinguish’
(principal parts: insĭgniō,
insĭgnīre, insĭgnīvī, insĭgnītum). It seems that the
conjugation of this verb was regularized in Vulgar Latin, probably by analogy with
other first conjugation verbs formed from first conjugation sĭgnāre.

The meaning change from ‘make a mark’ to ‘show’ and ‘teach’ is
not as far-fetched as it might seem. It turns out that already in Latin this verb
could mean ‘to make something known by pointing or signaling’ (note that the Spanish
word for topointout is señalar). From there to the main two meanings
that enseñar has in Modern Spanish is
not a long way. The Portuguese cognate ensinar
has both senses, just like Spanish, so these two senses may have been part of
these words from very early on. Cognates of this verb in other Romance languages,
however, only have the ‘teach, instruct’ sense, such as French enseigner [ɑ̃.se.ˈɲe] and Italian insegnare
[in.seɲ.ˈɲa.ɾe].

A very common word derived from Spanish enseñar is enseñanza, which is equivalent to
Eng. education, teaching, schooling, and instruction. Examples of this word in
common phrases are enseñanzasecundaria ‘secondary education’, enseñanzaobligatoria ‘compulsory education’, enseñanzasuperior ‘higher
education’, centrodeenseñanza
‘school’, enseñanzaenlínea
‘online education’, and dedicarsealaenseñanza ‘to be a teacher’. It can also
mean ‘teaching, doctrine’, as in lasenseñanzasdeJesús ‘the teachings of
Jesus’.

Interestingly, in some dialects of Spanish the reflexive form
of the verb enseñar, namely enseñarse,
literally ‘to teach oneself’, is the main or only way to express the meaning ‘to
learn’, which in standard Spanish is usually expressed by the verb aprender. Finally, the noun enseñante
is sometimes used to refer to an educator, though its use is not as common as the
words educador or instructor to express this meaning.

As we mentioned earlier, the verb īnsĭgnāre is unlike other prefixed ‑sĭgnāre verbs, in that it
was originally a fourth conjugation verb in Classical Latin, namely īnsĭgnīre.
The reason that this was a 4th conjugation verb is that it was not derived from
sĭgnāre by the addition of a prefix
like the other verbs we’ve seen, but rather, it was derived from the adjective īnsĭgnis ‘conspicuous, distinguished, famous,
etc.’ (i.e. “marked, remarkable”), which is also derived from
the root sĭgn‑.

Latin īnsignis (īn‑+‑sign‑+‑is) is both the masculine/feminine
nominative singular wordform of this third declension Latin adjective. Its neuter nominative singular form is īnsigne. From this form of the
adjective, Latin derived the third declension neuter ‘pure’ i-stem noun (nom. sg.) īnsigne ‘coat of arms, badge’. The nominative
plural of this noun was īnsignĭa, a word
that has made it into both English and Spanish, twice in each language, as
doublets: Eng. ensign and insignia and Sp. enseña and insignia. These
words are at best partial friends, if not fully false friends.

English ensign [ˈɛn.sən] is a 14th century borrowing from Old French enseigne, where the word was patrimonial.
It can translate into Spanish as the patrimonial enseña when it refers to ‘a
flag, especially a military or naval one indicating nationality’ (COED, also known
as bandera or pabellón in Spanish. When Eng. ensign
refers to a military rank, namely ‘the lowest rank of commissioned officer in
the US and some other navies, above chief warrant officer and below lieutenant’
(COED), it translates as alférez (de fragata), a word of Arabic origin.

English insignia [ɪn.ˈsɪɡ.niə̯] is a 17th century learned word.
It refers primarily to ‘a patch or other object that indicates a person’s official
or military rank, or membership in a group or organization’ (Wikipedia). It can
be used as a singular noun and as a plural noun. It seems at one point, English
could use the form insigne as a
singular form, but that use is now obsolete. Eng. insignia can be translated into Spanish as insignia [in.ˈsiɡ.ni̯a]
(pl. insignias). Spanish insignia, however, has a broader meaning
and can translate also as badge, flag, banner, or medal, all emblematic
symbols of organizations of different types.

Finally, we should mention that Spanish also has the learned,
fancy adjective insigne , which translates into English as ‘distinguished, eminent,
famous, notable’, e.g. Mi abuelo es un
insigne escultor ‘My grandfather is a famous sculptor’. It is a 15th century
borrowing from the neuter form of the already mentioned Latin adjective īnsĭgnis.

Sp. reseñar and resignar and Eng. resign

The third patrimonial Spanish verb based on Lat. ‑sĭgnāre is reseñar ‘to review, to describe,
to make a sketch, outline’. This verb is used, for example, for the writing of
reviews of books found in academic journals or of films in newspapers or Web sites.
The associated noun is reseña, which actually appeared in
the DLE before the verb reseñar, both
in the first half of the 19th century. The meanings of the noun reseña parallel those of the verb and
thus it translates as review when it
is about a book, summary or report’, when said of a meeting, for
example, or else as description.

The verb reseñar
comes ultimately from Lat. resĭgnāre,
with the prefix re‑ ‘back, again’ attached
to the verb sĭgnāre ‘to make a mark’.
In Latin, this verb had originally meant to ‘take back or undo a mark’ or in other
words ‘check off’, and from there ‘to unseal, open’ and, finally, ‘to annul, cancel,
invalidate, rescind, cancel, give up’. But another major meaning of the Latin word
at some point was ‘to write something down’ and it is from here came that the modern
meanings of reseñar.

re‑ ‘back, etc.’ + sĭgnāre

ĭnsĭgnāre

‘to undo a mark’, ‘to write something
down’, etc.

Additionally, Latin resĭgnāre has given us the learned cognate verbs Eng. resign [ɹɪ.ˈzaɪ̯n] and Sp. resignarse (reflexive). These verbs are not
close friends, however. That is because their meanings differ somewhat, for Spanish
only shares one of the two major meanings of English resign.

English resign has two main senses: ‘to give
up a position’ and ‘to give up to fate’. The meaning ‘to give up a position’, can
be seen as an extension of the ‘cancel, invalidate’ sense already mentioned for
Lat. resĭgnāre and it was already present
in English in the 14th century when it borrowed it from French resigner, a learned word in this language
(a 13th c. borrowing from Latin). But this sense is not available for Spanish resignar. In Spanish toresign
is dimitir or presentarladimisión.

The other sense of English resign, ‘to give up to fate’, is always used with a reflexive pronoun,
cf. toresign(oneself) ‘accept that
something undesirable cannot be avoided’ (COED), as in I resigned myself to living in obscurity forever. This is the only possible
sense of also reflexive Spanish resignarse. This sense of the English
word resign is not recorded before the
18th century, so it must have come late, but its seeds can already be seen in the
Latin sense ‘to give up’ and it may have come through French. (A semi-learned version
of this verb, namely resinar, with consonant
cluster simplification, is found Nebrija’s 15th century dictionary.)[1]

The nouns Sp. resignación and Eng. resignation,
derived from the respective verbs we just saw, are also semi-false-friends. English
resignation, like the verb resign, has two senses: ‘giving up a position’
and ‘giving up to fate’. As with the case of the verbs, the second sense translates
as resignación in Spanish, but not the
former one, which is rendered as dimisión (see above).

Sp. asignar and Eng. assign

Another pair of learned, cognate verbs in Spanish and
English that were derived from the Latin verb sĭgnāre are Sp. asignar [a.siɡ.ˈnaɾ]
~ Eng. assign [ə.ˈsaɪ̯n],
which are quite friendly cognates. They come from Lat. assĭgnāre, which was formed by the preposition/prefix ad‑ ‘to’ plus the verb sĭgnāre and meant something like ‘to mark
out, to allot (by sign), to attribute’. This verb came into English in the
early 14th century through French learned assigner,
which borrowed it from Latin first. Sp. asignar is also a loanword and it is
already attested in the 13th century. It may have been borrowed directly from Latin
or, more likely, through French.

ad‑ ‘to’ + sĭgnāre

assĭgnāre

‘to mark out, to allot (by sign), to
attribute’

There are a couple of nouns derived from the Latin
verb that have also made it into English and Spanish. English has a derived noun
assignment
[ə.ˈsaɪ̯n.mənt], whose main
meaning is ‘an assigned task’. It is a 14th century borrowing from Old French assignement (or assinnement), from Medieval Latin assignamentum (ad+sign+a+ment+um).
(French does not have a reflex of this noun any longer, although it does have a
verb assigner.)

The word assignment
does not have a Spanish cognate. The meaning ‘assigned task’ in Spanish is expressed
typically by the noun tarea, if it’s a small assignment, or
misión,
if it is a large one. When assignment
means just ‘the act of assigning’, as opposed to ‘something that has been assigned’,
then Spanish can use the noun asignación.

The Spanish noun asignación is a cognate of the rare
English learned noun (15th c.) assignation
[ˌæ.sɪɡ.ˈneɪ̯.ʃən],
which may refer to ‘the act of assigning’, but also to ‘a secret arrangement to
meet’, typically between lovers (Sp. citaaescondidas
or citadeamantes). The most
common meaning of Sp. asignación,
however, is ‘allocation of something’, usually a ‘money allowance’. These learned
words come from the Latin noun stem assĭgnātiōn‑
(nom. assĭgnātiō, acc. assĭgnātiōnem), which
was formed from the past participle stem (assĭgnāt‑) of the verb assĭgnāre and the noun-forming suffix ‑iōn‑ that we have seen so
often (cf. ad+sĭgn+ā+t+iōn+em).

Spanish has another noun derived from the verb asignar, namely asignatura. It means primarily
‘school subject’, a particular area of study that is taught formally in a class,
such as Calculus or Economics. This noun does not have an English cognate. It
is a learned loanword from Latin assignātūra,
derived from the past-participle stem assĭgnāt‑
of the verb assĭgnāre and the
noun-forming suffix ‑ūr‑ and the feminine nominative
inflexional ending ‑a (cf. signature above). The suffix ‑ūr‑
was one of the suffixes used to derive nouns from Latin verbs, which has
resulted in a number of nouns in ‑ure
in English and in ‑ura in Spanish
(cf. Eng. signature). Common phrases involving
the word asignatura in an academic environment
are the following: asignaturaobligatoria ‘required course’, asignaturaoptativa ‘optional subject, elective course’, and asignaturapendiente ‘remaining subject, do-over subject’, which can also mean,
by extension, ‘unfinished business, unresolved matter’.

Sp. consignar and Eng. consign

The verbs Sp. consignar [kon.siɡ.ˈnaɾ] ~ Eng. consign
[kən.ˈsaɪ̯n] are also cognates derived from sĭgnāre,
neither one of which is very common in its language. They are also only partial
friends. They go back to Lat. consĭgnāre
‘to (fix a) seal; to register (put on record), etc.’, which was formed from the
prefix com‑ ‘with’, plus the verb sĭgnāre ‘to mark with a sign’.

con‑ ‘with’ + sĭgnāre

consĭgnāre

‘to (fix a) seal; to register (put on
record), etc.’

Both are
learned words. Both words came either directly from Latin or from a learned French
consigner, English consign is first attested in the 15th century
and Spanish consignar in the 16th century.
When English borrowed this word, it had the same meaning as French consigner, namely ‘to ratify by a sign or
seal’. The Modern English verb consign
has three major, related senses:

(1)‘to
deliver to someone’s custody’ (COED)

(2)‘to
send (goods) by a public carrier’ (COED) (added in the 17th c. and now obsolete)

(3)‘to
set aside for some purpose’, as in a consignment store, or to get rid of.

Spanish consignar
has 8 senses according to Larousse, 5 according to VOX, and 10 according to DLE,
all of them quite specialized and rare and not likely to be known by most speakers
of the language. There is overlap between the words in the two languages so, for
instance, Spanish has senses that are the same as, or similar to, all the three
senses of English consign mentioned above.

There are also a few nouns related to the verbs just mentioned.
As we just saw in sense (3) above, English has a noun consignment [kən.ˈsaɪ̯n.mənt] to refer to either to
the act of consigning or to the goods consigned. This noun was formed in English out of the verb consign and the Latinate suffix ‑ment, which creates nouns from verbs.

Not surprisingly, because of its origin, Spanish does not have
a cognate of this noun. Things that are consigned in the sense of being sent by
carrier are known as a remesa or envío, e.g. Yesterday they sent a consignment of books ‘Enviaron una
remesa/envío de libros ayer’. Things that are consigned in the sense of being set
aside, may be known in some contexts and in some dialects as consignación, a related word formed from
the verb consignar and the suffix ‑ción (from Lat. ‑t‑iōn‑).

Spanish also has a noun consigna, which is more common
than, but very different in meaning from, the verb consignar. Actually, consigna
can have four rather different meanings:

(1)(inSpain)
the check-room at a train station (left-luggage office)

(2)a
secret sign, password, watchword

(3)a
political slogan

(4)order
or instruction given to subordinates

Actually, sense (2) is rare. A more common word for
password in Spanish than consigna is yet another seña word, namely contraseña, probably the most
common one for this meaning. English too used to have a cognate noun countersign, now obsolete, with the same
meaning Sp. contraseña originally
had, namely ‘a signal or password given in reply to a soldier on guard’ (COED).
The source of this meaning has to do with a military practice in which in order
for two soldiers to known that they were on the same side, one soldier gave a certain
sign or seña and the other soldier would
give the countersign or contraseña.

Nowadays contraseña
in Spanish is the main word used for ‘password’ as used on the Internet, for
instance (even though there is no seña
for it to go with). In English, countersign
is now just used as a verb, meaning ‘to add a signature to (a document already signed
by another person)’ (COED) (cf. Sp. refrendar).

Sp. persignarse

Spanish has one more verb based on Lat. sĭgnāre, namely the reflexive persignarse
‘to cross oneself’, ‘to make the sign of the cross’.[2]
This verb is a 17th century borrowing from Latin. In Latin persĭgnāre meant ‘to note down, record’. It was formed from the prefix
per‑ ‘through, etc.’ and the verb sĭgnāre ‘to make a mark’.

per‑ ‘through’ + sĭgnāre

persĭgnāre

‘to note down, record’

The meaning of Spanish persignarse does not agree the original meaning of the Latin word,
so it must have been a meaning that the word acquired in Church Latin. It
refers to an act of self-blessing by making ‘the sign of the cross in front of one’s
chest as a sign of Christian reverence or to invoke divine protection’ (COED). As
we saw earlier, an early word for this meaning was signarse, without the prefix per‑,
though that word is now obsolete.

In the Catholic Christian tradition, centered in Rome, one crosses
oneself by pointing with one’s right hand to one’s forehead, then one’s chest, then
one’s left shoulder, and finally one’s right shoulder, all while reciting the words
InthenameoftheFather,theSon,andtheHolyGhost (in Spanish: Enelnombredelpadre,delhijoydelespíritusanto). In the Orthodox
Christian tradition, centered in Constantinople until its fall in 1453, the order
of the last two steps is reversed. Some Protestant Christian traditions, such as
Lutherans and Methodists, also use this symbolism.

Sp. significar
and Eng. signify

Finally, there is one more very important set of cognate words
of the sign word family, the set of
lexemes that contain the Latin sĭgn‑ root,
namely the compounds Sp. significar and Eng. signify.
Both of these verbs are learned loanwords that come ultimately from Lat. sĭgnĭfĭcāre ‘to signify,
indicate, show’ (sĭgn+ĭ+fĭc+ā+re).

These two words are vaguely related in meaning, but they are
rather false friends, since they are not used the same way. Spanish significar
means ‘to mean’, plain and simple, e.g. ¿Quésignificaesto? ‘What does this mean?’ (lit. ‘What does this signify?’) (cf.
Part I, Chapter 6).
Eng. signify, on the other hand, is a
formal word that means ‘to represent, mean, or be a sign of something’ (DOCE).
Although the literal meanings are similar, Eng. signify is rarely translated by Sp. significar. More likely translations would be indicar, ser indicio de, mostrar, expresar, señalar, or simbolizar. Likewise, Sp. significar never translates into English
as signify, but rather primarily as to mean, but also to represent, to involve,
and to express.

The noun associated with and derived from the verb significar in Spanish is significado
‘meaning’. Of course, significado was
originally the past participle of the verb significar,
as in ¿Quéhasignificadoestoparati? ‘What has this meant to you?’. English
does have a cognate of Spanish significado,
namely the noun significate [sɪɡ.ˈnɪ.fɪ.kǝt], which is first attested in the 15th century,
but which is very rare. One dictionary gives the following meaning for this
noun: ‘that which is signified or symbolized’ (SOED). Both of these nouns are derived
from the past participle of Lat. sĭgnĭficāre,
namely sĭgnĭficātus

There is an adjective in Spanish that is derived from the verb
significar, namely significativo,
which translates as meaningful or significant, even though English also
has a fancy adjective significative,
with pretty much the same meaning, but which is much rarer. These two cognates
come from the Latin adjective signĭfĭcātīvus
‘denoting, signifying, significative’, formed with the Latin suffix ‑īv‑,
which attached itself to past participle stems of verbs (sign+ĭ+fĭc+ā+t+īv+us).

As we just saw, one of the possible translations of Sp. significativo is Eng. significant.
This last word is also a derivate of the verb sĭgnĭficāre. It comes from this verb’s present participle, whose
stem was signĭfĭcant‑ (nom. signĭfĭcans, acc. signĭfĭcantem). Present participles such as this one were used as
adjectives in Latin, but were also sometimes nominalized (turned into nouns).
Eng. significant means ‘extensive or important
enough to merit attention’ (COED). Besides significativo,
this English adjective significant can
translate into Spanish as importante,
trascendente, or considerable, e.g. Tuve que
pagar una cantidad considerable de dinero por ese arreglo ‘I had to pay a
significant amount of money for that repair job’. Spanish does have a cognate
adjective significante, but this is
merely a technical term in linguistics, as we saw in Chapter 6,
§6.1.
Its English equivalent is signifier.
Both Sp. significante and Eng. signifier are calques of Fr. signifiant, a technical coinage by
Ferdinand de Saussure.

[a] Modern
French designer /de.zi.ˈɲe/ has three
main senses: (1) (to show ) ‘to point out, to indicate’, (2) (choose) ‘to
choose, single out’, and (3) (name) ‘to appoint, nominate’.